


Team Sloth, From the Beginning

by luoup (ravenic)



Category: RWBY
Genre: Backstory, Childhood Friends, Gen, Minor Character Death, team sloth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 11:11:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8203772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ravenic/pseuds/luoup
Summary: Ren and Nora from childhood





	

**Author's Note:**

> essentially, this is my entire headcanon backstory for ren and nora. everything I write in RWBY is going to use this as the background for Team Sloth, at least until we get a little more canon backstory for these two. in short, i had vague ideas for ren&nora history, and then my brain took the tiny hints we got from canon before v4 and ran away to the moon with it. enjoy.
> 
> EDIT: we now have canon backstory. i'm probably still going to stick with this, i've had it for too long.

They meet in kindergarten. Or maybe it’s preschool. They meet when they are young, and it’s like a spark igniting in the dark, like a flower blooming at last. Something just clicks. Even at that age, Ren is quiet and withdrawn. Even at that age, Nora is loud and rambunctious. But Nora will sit still when she’s with Ren, and she is the only one in the entire class that he will talk to.

Their families are overjoyed. Nora’s parents were worried that her exuberance would scare away any potential friends, and Ren’s parents were afraid that his silence would do the same. But somehow, they bonded – bonded fast and hard in the way that is more permanent than time itself – and were instant, if somewhat unusual, friends.

The Valkyries are both hunters. She wields Brunhilde, shaped like a sledgehammer but with the addition of a sort of sharpshooter rifle, while his is named Muninn and is a grenade launcher sometimes and something like a morningstar the rest of the time. Nora worships them both, and they like to joke that she’s going to steal their weapons and run off to be a huntress herself by the time she’s ten years old.

Ren’s parents are tailors. He is a soft-spoken man with long fine fingers and a laugh like springtime, she has tumbling black hair and a mind like liquid diamond. Neither of them have ever touched a weapon in their lives. Their son is quiet but his smiles are true and he brings them plants he finds on his walks to school, and they know that he will grow into a wonderful young man.

Nora and Ren might have stayed like that forever. Close friends, growing up together in the same tiny village in the middle of nowhere, probably marrying as soon as they were old enough simply because of convention and expectations, lived long and happy lives together. But life doesn’t work that way. Ren and Nora are only seven when the Grimm attack.

Fire and teeth and screaming and death, and in the aftermath there is nothing left but ashes and blood, and two tiny children crawling from the wreckage to cling to one another as if there is nothing else left in the world.

And for them, there isn’t. Everything they know has burned to the ground, lost in black and white and red. They have survived, but there is nothing left. Mothers, fathers, teachers, friends – all gone, and nothing remaining. Just two small scared children, alone in the world.

But they aren’t alone. They never will be. They make that promise that night, covered in ash and dust. They will never leave each other alone, not ever again. The world is burned and empty and there is nothing at all, except for each other.

They spend years like that. Working any kind of odd job just for pennies and learning to steal what they can’t buy, sleeping in alleyways or anywhere else they can find, fighting for what little they have against other children who have just as little. Ignored at best and chased after and shouted at at worst. Summers are hot and dry, winters bitter-cold. They move at random – nowhere matters. They never have enough, not of anything.

One day when they are eleven, Nora tells Ren that she wants to become a huntress.

She has never seen him so angry. He even yells, something he never does, shouting that she should not try to do what got her parents killed. She shouts right back – no one should go through what happened to them, and she wants to protect people. Maybe if there were more hunters, someone would have come to their village and saved them, and her parents would not have been torn apart by ursa as they tried to save the entire village, and Ren’s parents wouldn’t have been poisoned by king taijitu and died helpless in front of him. If she can save a life and keep a child from being forced into their lives, shouldn’t she?

Ren can’t fight her. He never has. The next day, they both apply to Umbra Academy. She because she is a huntress – it is in her blood. He because he will never leave her – she is his heart.

It’s long and complicated, but they explain enough to the woman in charge of admissions that she agrees to let them in. It’s not a charity case, though, not really. Nora is strong as strong can be, if a bit easily distracted and maybe more violent than an eleven-year-old really ought to be, and Ren’s aura levels are off the charts, although he has low stamina and a significant aversion to social interaction. Neither of them are in the best of health physically, but they are determined and there are enough cases of Grimm-orphans that it is not much to note that they are accepted into Umbra Academy to begin their hunter schooling.

Their education has been in pieces, to put it nicely. Ren had tried to keep them learning things, and they had both done well in classes before everything, but they had been a long time without real education, and when you’re just trying to survive, school is pretty low on the list of things to do. They struggle, Nora more than Ren because he is a good reader and she has a short attention span, but they do okay.

There are many other students at Umbra Academy, but Nora and Ren do not talk to them. They are together, and no one else really matters. They go to classes, eat food (!), sleep in beds (!!), and train, but they have minimal interaction with their fellow classmates. They just don’t care. No one understands them, and they have no interest in explaining themselves.

Then comes the most important thing. They design their weapons.

Nora’s is easy. She had always wanted to wield her mother’s hammer. She makes it bigger, heavier, stronger; it’s more like a warhammer than a sledgehammer. She’s no good at sniping, though – her eyesight isn’t fantastic and she has none of the patience required to be a sharpshooter. But grenades – now grenades she can do. Grenades she likes. Pink, of course, and shaped like hearts because why not? And so Magnhild is made.

Ren’s parent’s weren’t hunters. He has next to no experience with weapons, and his main strength lies in his aura powers anyway. His weapon, when he makes it, is simple. Two weapons, actually, smooth and green, a handgun for long range with curved blades for close combat, but they don’t change form at all. Almost every hunter’s weapon has at least two forms, but his are plain. They could almost be boring, except that he uses them very well and they suit him perfectly.

But it is the name that makes Nora cry. Ren names his weapons StormFlower. He has no hunter heritage, no legacy to carry on. He only has himself and her, and he puts everything into that – even his weapon. Nora’s Magnhild is her mother’s hammer and her father’s grenades and her own designs, but Ren’s StormFlower is for the two of them, for all that they have left. For Nora and Ren.

They get through Umbra without forming any real connections to any other students, or to any of the teachers. They don’t need them. No one seemed to be able to handle the combination of Nora’s wild energy and Ren’s unnerving silence, and it’s not like there is ever one without the other. So they aren’t totally on their own anymore, but they still don’t really have anyone else.

Some teachers try to separate the two, concerned that their relationship was unhealthy. At best, Nora is uncooperative and Ren won’t talk. On a bad day, either one can become violent if anyone tried to divide them. Most teachers give up trying to do anything about it pretty quickly.

They make it through Umbra. They graduate. Then it’s time for Beacon Academy.

Umbra was pre-hunter-schooling, really. Beacon is for real. They’ll learn to fight grimm. They’ll become stronger. They’ll get teams.

Teams.

It is both exciting and distressing. Nora can’t seem to decide whether she wants to be friends with the whole school or break the legs of every person who so much as looks at Ren. Ren doesn’t know if he will ever be able to talk normally to someone who isn’t Nora, if “teammate” will ever come even close to what Nora is to him. Neither of them are certain that they will survive at all if they are not made partners.

The first night is hard. They are informed that girls and boys are supposed to sleep on opposite sides of the room, but that isn’t going to happen. Ren and Nora haven’t slept apart since that night when their world burned and bled around them and left nothing behind. So they wait until the lights are out, and Nora sneaks over to the boys’ side, and steps on the foot of the first boy to protest, after which they all mostly shut up (even that early, Nora is getting a reputation).

They don’t talk about it, but both Ren and Nora are wound tight all through the next morning. They have to be partners. They have to. Professor Ozpin talks and talks, and neither of them listen to a word he says because they have been studying to be Hunters for as long as they could have and they know all of this already.  
Nora flies through the air, firing Magnhild again and again and riding it like a surfboard, and realizes belatedly that it is going to be very hard to find a quiet, thin boy dressed in green in the middle of a forest. She’ll just have to make a lot of noise and be pinker than usual. They’ll find each other. They have to.

Ren uses Stormflower’s blades to catch himself and lands lightly. He knows that Nora’s probably already made a crater and flattened a few Ursa by now. He’ll come to her. But Nora has never had a thing for subtlety, and there is a fear set deep in his chest that someone else will find her first. Ren is fast. He is fast and he knows Nora as well as he knows himself. They’ll find each other. They have to.

Ren kills a King Taijitu, and Nora fights an Ursa or seven and squashes an entire pack of Beowolves, and then teal eyes meet pink and there are sloth noises and booping and all the fear fades away, because they are partners officially now, and nothing can come between them.

They kind of ignore it, distracting themselves with riding Ursa and fighting a truly enormous Scorpius and a Nevermore that came out of nowhere, working together with a bunch of other new students, but it is in truth the first time that the two have had a reunion. Their parents and village died, no time for goodbyes and no one to be reunited with at the end, and it’s not like there was ever anyone else, after. They have never been separate for long enough to have a reunion. But that moment in the Emerald Forest, when Ren heard Nora’s sloth noises after the time without Nora-sounds, and Nora could reach Ren again to boop his nose after the time with no Ren standing within arm’s reach – that is new, and strange, and they aren’t sure they like it. _Easy,_ Nora thinks absently, clinging to the Ursa’s spikes and shrieking with joy while Ren presses closer to her side, _we just won’t ever separate again. No problem._

They are partners, but a team is four people, not two. Ren and Nora are together now, for sure, but what about the other two? It might go well, but it is entirely possible that they will be bad. That they won’t understand, that they will be cruel. Neither Ren nor Nora know what they will do if that happens – you are supposed to stay with your team through your time at Beacon, and sometimes even beyond.

But they stand together, side by side as always. They will make it through this, just as they have with everything else. At least they can’t be separated. They’re partners now, officially, although they have always been so.

And then it is announced: “Jaune Arc, Nora Valkyrie, Pyrrha Nikos, Lie Ren. Team JNPR, led by Jaune Arc.”

These two are familiar. Ren and Nora fought with them at Forever Fall. Jaune Arc – awkward, not the greatest Hunter, but kind, and even managed to keep up with Nora for a few minutes. Pyrrha Nikos – famous, apparently (not that Ren and Nora would know about things like that, having grown up with no time or energy for such interests), and an incredible warrior even from the short time she spent fighting with them.

But more importantly – they are both good people. Ren and Nora can work with them. They can do this.

They stand in a line, for once not beside one another. Pyrrha is between them, but neither one resents her for it – that alone may be more significant than anything else. There is applause, and then they are moving on, the moment over, but really it is only just beginning.

The four sit together, after. Nora sits beside Ren instead of between Jaune and Pyrrha, but neither of the others seem to mind. Jaune offers Nora one of his chips, and Pyrrha asks Ren about the book she saw him reading earlier.

This just might work.

Ren and Nora have been alone for so long. They have had nothing but each other for so long, they almost forgot what it was like to trust other people, to rely on other people, to want to be with anyone else. It won’t happen overnight, not for anyone and not for people who have lived through what Ren and Nora have lived through, but for the first time in a very, very long time… they want to be with someone else. No one can replace who they are to each other, but now Ren wants to start a garden with Pyrrha, and Nora wants to drag Jaune around with her to explore campus, and Ren wants to find out if Jaune likes cooking too, and Nora _really_ wants to try training against Pyrrha.

Their families died in fire and blood years ago. Since that night, there has been no one else in the world who mattered besides each other. Nothing. They survived, they lived from one day to the next. Nothing more, nothing less. All that mattered was the other. The teachers, the classmates, the people who passed them on the street – not a single other human on the planet meant anything to them. Ren and Nora were just that, only that – Ren and Nora. Always together, never one without the other, and no one else.

Now that might be changing. Of course, it would always be Ren and Nora – that won’t change, not ever. But now there is more. There is the possibility that sometime in the not-so-distant future, it could be Ren-and-Nora-and-Jaune-and-Pyrrha. Instead of Ren and Nora standing alone against the whole world, it could be Team JNPR. For the first time since that terrible night, maybe they could rely on someone else. It would take time, but for the first time, it’s possible.

JNPR has great potential, both as Hunters and as a team. Ozpin never makes a mistake. But in the end, at the heart, some things will remain the same. It is the way it’s always been, and the way it always will be. Ren and Nora. Nora and Ren.

Team Sloth, forever.

**Author's Note:**

> i am entirely too devoted to team sloth


End file.
